The Coolest Robots from FIRST 2011

High school robotics teams descended upon St. Louis this weekend for the FIRST championships. In the event's first year in the Gateway City, FIRST Robotics Championship teams competed in the Logo Motion event: building robots capable of grabbing delicate inflatable tubes and hanging them on pegs, sometimes autonomously. As usual, the student engineers came up with some wild and amazing designs.

Logo Motion

Logo Motion

Logo Motion was the name of the game for the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) in 2011. High school students from around the world built 120-pound robots that could create the FIRST logo—a triangle, a circle and a square, in that order—in the form of inflatable balloons in those shapes, which the bots hung on metal pegs at the ends of the rectangular playing field.

The students competed in alliances of three teams each, with an alliance in red taking on an alliance decorated in blue. For the opening stage of each match, the robots had to operate autonomously and attempt to hang a yellow circular balloon. Then, in the second stage, the court became a frenzied battle royal as the student drivers assumed control of their machines, trying to pick up the inflatables with robot claws and hang as many triangle-circle-square logos as possible. Finally, in the last 10 seconds of the match, the teams deployed their minibots—robots about the size of toaster that raced up to the top of a metal pole to score extra points.

The RoboWranglers (Team 148)

The RoboWranglers (Team 148)

"We wanted it to be simple. But we wanted it to be a little intimidating too." That's how junior Keri Porter from Team 148 out of Greenville, Texas—the RoboWranglers—explained her team's design. The powder-coated aluminum frame reflecting red LEDs makes this a mean-looking machine.